Republics, Democracy
- Lafyva
- Nov 3, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.
Like many other developing-country leaders, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi learned this lesson during the second half of the 1980s. His high-profile efforts to `modernise' and `liberalise' the Indian economy lasted less than three years before they were effectively abandoned doned in favour of the more comfortable path of state-led development. Powerful interests, both inside and outside the state, were credited with forcing Rajiv's retreat from liberalisation. Democracy's theoretical aversionsion to change seemed confirmed. That liberalisation eventually returned to India in a much more dramatic and lasting form under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh is thus a puzzle worth untangling. The political durability of India's reform programme gramme runs counter not only to much of the experience in the rest of the developing world, but also to India's own lacklustre track record.
Rob Jenkins. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India (Contemporary South Asia) (Kindle Locations 92-95). Kindle Edition.
In short, there are two variants of conventional wisdom about the relationship between democracy and the promotion of policy reform, and both are wrong. Democracies are less constrained by unholy interest-group group coalitions than was previously thought, but neither are they paragons gons of consensus-building. Democratically elected governments operate in a complicated world in which obfuscation and betrayal are routinely used to achieve political ends. Arguably democracy makes such tactics both necessary and possible. Advanced capitalist democracies rely on them all the time. Nevertheless, the explanation advanced in this book is not simply that India's reformers were Machiavellian enough to outwit opponents of liberalisation. Our concern is with the system within which reform was sustained. We identify three aspects of that system, around which the case material is structured: political incentives, political institutions, tions, and political skills.
Rob Jenkins. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India (Contemporary South Asia) (Kindle Locations 123-127). Kindle Edition.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many development economists believed in the “vicious cycle of poverty” theory, which argued that poverty in the developing world prevented the accumulation of domestic savings.
In short, the theoretical case for foreign aid is, at best, questionable, and aid’s practical impact on some of the world’s poorest economies may well have been harmful.
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